Mr. Smith returns to his home of an evening at 6:30. Mr. Smith’s home
is in a fairly long street, containing some dozens of homes exactly
like Mr. Smith’s. It has a drawing-room and a dining-room, two or three
bedrooms, and one or two attics, also a narrow hall (with stained glass
in the front door), a kitchen, a bathroom, a front garden, and a back
garden. It has a service of gas and of water, and excellent drains. The
kitchen range incidentally heats the water for the bathroom, so that
the bath water is hottest at about noon on Sundays, when nobody, wants
it, and coldest first thing in the morning, and last thing at night,
when everybody wants it. (This is a detail. The fact remains that when
hot water is really required it can always be had by cooking a joint of
beef.)
The house and its two gardens are absolutely private. The front garden
is made private by iron rails; its sole purposes are to withdraw the
house a little from the road and to enable the servant to fill up
her spare time by washing tiles. The back garden is made private
by match-boarding. The house itself is made private by a mysterious
substance unsurpassed as a conductor of sound.
Mr. Smith’s home is adequately furnished. There may be two beds in a
room, but each person has a bed. Carpets are everywhere; easy chairs and
a sofa do not lack; linen is sufficient; crockery is plenteous. As for
cutlery, Mr. Smith belongs to the only race in the world which allows
itself a fresh knife and fork to each course of a meal. The drawing-room
is the best apartment and the least used. It has a piano, but, as
the drawingroom fire is not a constant phenomenon, pianists can
only practise with regularity and comfort during four months of the
year--hence, perhaps, a certain mediocrity of performance.
Mr. Smith sits down to tea in the dining-room. According to fashionable
newspapers, tea as a square meal has quite expired in England. On six
days a week, however, tea still constitutes the chief repast in about
99 per cent, of English homes. At the table are Mrs. Smith and three
children--John, aged 25; Mary, aged 22; and Harry, aged 15. For I must
inform you that Mr. Smith is 50, and his wife is very near 50. Mr. Smith
gazes round at his home, his wife, and his children. He has been at work
in the world for 34 years, and this spectacle is what he has to show
for his labour. It is his reward. It is the supreme result. He hurries
through his breakfast, and spends seven industrious hours at the works
in order that he may have tea nicely with his own family in his own home
of a night.
Well, the food is wholesome and sufficient, and they are all neat and
honest, and healthy--except Mrs. Smith, whose health is not what it
ought to be. Mr. Smith conceals his pride in his children, but the pride
is there. Impossible that he should not be proud! He has the right to be
proud. John is a personable young man, earning more and more every year.
Mary is charming in her pleasant blouse, and Harry is getting enormous,
and will soon be leaving school.
*****
This tea, which is the daily blossoming-time of the home that Mr. Smith
and his wife have constructed with 26 years’ continual effort, ought
to be a very agreeable affair. Surely the materials for pleasure are
present! But it does not seem to be a very agreeable meal. There is no
regular conversation. Everybody has the air of being preoccupied with
his own affairs. A long stretch of silence; then some chaffing or
sardonic remark by one child to another; then another silence; then a
monosyllable from Mr. Smith; then another silence.
No subject of wide interest is ever seriously argued at that table. No
discussion is ever undertaken for the sake of discussion. It has never
occurred to anyone named Smith that conversation in general is an art
and may be a diverting pastime, and that conversation at table is a
duty. Besides, conversation is nourished on books, and books are rarer
than teaspoons in that home. Further, at back of the excellent, honest,
and clean mind of every Smith is the notion that politeness is something
that one owes only to strangers.
When tea is over--and it is soon over--young John Smith silently departs
to another home, very like his own, in the next street but one. In that
other home is a girl whom John sincerely considers to be the pearl of
womanhood. In a few months John, inspired and aided by this pearl, will
embark in business for himself as constructor of a home.
Mary Smith wanders silently and inconspicuously into the drawing-room
(it being, as you know summer) and caresses the piano in an expectant
manner. John’s views as to the identity of the pearl of womanhood are
not shared by another young man who lives not very far off. This other
young man has no doubt whatever that the pearl of womanhood is precisely
Mary Smith (an idea which had never entered John’s head); and he comes
to see Mary every night, with the permission of her parents. The pair
are, in fact, engaged. Probably Mary opens the door for him, in which
case they go straight to the drawing-room. (One is glad to think that,
after all, the drawingroom is turning out useful.) Young Henry has
disappeared from human ken.
*****
Mr. Smith and wife remain in the dining-room, separated from each
other by a newspaper, which Mr. Smith is ostensibly reading. I say
“ostensibly,” for what Mr. Smith is really reading on the page of the
newspaper is this: “I shall have to give something to John, something
pretty handsome. Of course, there’s no question of a dowry with Mary,
but I shall have to give something handsome to her, too. And weddings
cost money. And I have no savings, except my insurance.” He keeps on
reading this in every column. It is true. He is still worried about
money, as he was 26 years ago. He has lived hard and honourably, ever
at strain, and never had a moment’s true peace of mind: once it was the
fear of losing his situation; now it is the fear of his business going
wrong; always it has been the tendency of expenditure to increase. The
fruit of his ancient immense desire to have Mrs. Smith is now ripe for
falling. The home which he and she have built is finished now, and is to
be disintegrated. And John and Mary are about to begin again what their
parents once began. I can almost hear Mr. Smith plaintively asking the
newspaper, as he thinks over the achieved enterprise of his home: Has it
been a success? Is it a success?